There are worse ways to wake up than floating in the South Pacific anchored off one of the Galápagos Islands.
That island happened to be Floreana, one of the more storied islands out here. And that’s saying something.
Floreana has a freshwater spring that has provided sanctuary to eons of animals and 300 years of intermittent human inhabitants. Never home to any indigenous humans, it was a frequent stopover for pirates and whalers during the peak eras of both professions. It played a critical role in the communications network of the time. A barrel set up in the early 1800s served as a makeshift post office, allowing ships to drop off letters and also pick up any addressed to the places they might be heading. Freshwater and a single barrel count as downright metropolitan out here, so when German Physician and Nietzsche enthusiast, Friedrich Ritter, was looking to create a post-nihilistic Eden to escape from the excesses of post WWI and percolating Naziism, he selected Floreana. I’m not sure it was the most inspired of choices (it’s effectively a desert, we’ll get to that in a bit), but this is a person who removed all of his own teeth before the trip to avoid any dental problems. I don’t think he was starting with all his marbles, to put it mildly.
Ritter brought his lover, Dore Strauch (both of them leaving families behind in Europe), to Floreana and they attempted to forage an existence out of pretty limited resources. I get the impression that they weren’t the most prepared of survivalists. A particular gem from their story that illustrates this point nicely is that when Dore’s teeth started to go, Ritter pulled the rest of them and the pair shared a single set of dentures to eat all their meals. Gross.
The letters Ritter sent to newspapers back home generated a lot of public interest, and somehow Ritter was surprised when the letters he published in major German newspapers about building an island paradise attracted people from Germany looking for an island paradise. He wanted to build an island paradise, but his definition of paradise included no other inhabitants. So he was more than a little chagrined when the first boats started to make their way towards "his" island. The first to arrive were Heinz and Margaret Wittmer, who, despite setting off for a desert island four months pregnant with their first child together, are still the closest thing to sane in this entire escapade. That becomes strikingly obvious when the next to arrive is the self-proclaimed “Baroness” von Wagner and her two man-servants. They all get along about as well as you’d imagine a philosopher-hermit, a German Family Robinson, and an eccentric wannabe socialite would. Disaster(s) ensues, and several of them wind up dead under very mysterious circumstances.
I’m trying not to take up this entire blog post by rehashing this bizarre train wreck of a story, but it’s pretty hard to get out of my mind. Watch the 2013 documentary about it, or simply Google “Freidrich Ritter.” Either way, you’ll spend about two hours immersed in this story and will never be the same again. I also just discovered that there’s a dramatization of this story coming out later this year staring Jude Law as Freidrich Ritter. I. Can’t. Wait.
Ok. Travel blog. We’re traveling.
After a nice breakfast [Ritter], we set off on a little dinghy [Baroness] for one of the mini islands [four months pregnant] dotting Floreana’s coast. Sorry. I’m really trying here. It's such a bizarre story. But I think I can finally move on now.
The main attraction of the after-breakfast stop was to get our first good look at sea lions (lobos del mar, or sea wolves, in Spanish).
Although, as a parent, it was equally fun to watch my kids get a good look at the sea lions.
But all four of us melted over seeing our first blue footed boobies.
They’re real! They exist in other places besides the t-shirts people bring back from the Galápagos Islands!
We happened to be there during mating season, and got to watch their adorable to the point of ridiculous courtship ritual.
Kudos to Mimi for snagging that awesome video. Usually the only thing I get when I let her borrow my phone is 10 minutes of deleting photos of one of her eyeballs. But she’s really starting to get the hang of it now.
Our hike took us through scenery that wouldn’t seem out of place back home in Arizona. It’s easy to forget this when we’re in the middle of the South Pacific, but the Galapagos straddle the equator. And like most places along the equator, they don’t get a lot of rain.
From there, it was over to Floreana Island proper, and of course the requisite stop at Post Office Bay.
These days, the only letters coming or going are in the hands of tourists. So we looked (unsuccessfully) for any addressed to people in Arizona, and left a few postcards of our own.
[Don’t hold out hope that any of you will ever get them. I noticed that all of the letters in the very full barrel were dated within the last few days and I’m 100% sure the guide surreptitiously “deliver” a big batch of letters to the incinerator every time they get back to the inhabited islands.]
Then it was back to the boat for some lunch and lounging ahead of our afternoon hike.
This was after the four of us were out cold taking a very solid nap. Too much fun.
Flamingos. There are also somehow flamingos on this island. That was the main attraction of our afternoon hike.
At least is is for pretty much everyone else who visits there. But our children were pulled to the beach with a magnetism shown only by kids who grew up in the desert.
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| “What, Dad?! Sure, this island is teeming with some of the most unique biology in the world. But there’s sand AND water in the same place!” |
Although that particular beach was apparently teeming with fire ant eggs, contact with which causes a burning sensation not unlike the bite of an adult. Our guide, Ivan, told us that with the direct gruffness we were learning was his baseline around anything related to children. "Don't play on beach. You'll be burning all night." I wasn’t sure if I was just imagining his antipathy towards little ones until back on the boat that night, when I asked Ivan if there was anything I could use as birthday decorations. (I realized just after putting Quinn to bed for the last time as a 5 year old that I left the “Happy Birthday” banner Aimee made in the bag we left at Alicia’s. Not great.) I got a real hard, “No.” from Ivan, and realized I’d be on my own for this.
I wasn’t really sweating the interpersonal element; I knew we’d win him over by the end of the trip. But I did need to come up with something to undo my mis-pack. So I scoured the ships humble take-one, leave-one library, and figured no one would miss what appeared to be a German romance novel from the early 90s.
I quietly ripped out a couple dozen pages, and wrote F-E-L-I-Z C-U-M-P-L-E-A-Ñ-O-S on them. I strung the pages up on the nylon cord that I had also used as our alarm system in Cotacachi and patted myself of the back for what I thought was a halfway-decent banner, given the circumstances.
I was just happy that Quinn could barely even read the Feliz Cumpleaños part of the banner or else his first words in German would make even the Baroness blush.
Ah! I thought I was done with that story. Guess not. I should probably just go to bed and try not to dream of pulling out my own teeth. With our boat now underway to the next island and gently rocking back and forth in the water, that wasn't going to be a problem. Gute Nacht.
